WinForms Grid Based Reporting (Coming soon in v15.2)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a short blog about our upcoming Grid-based reporting solution for our WPF product line. As is always the case when we announce a new feature for a specific .NET platform, one of the questions on people's minds was whether the same capability will be introduced for WinForms. The good news is that yes, it will.

Before I describe grid-based reporting for WinForms, let me give you a quick background..

Over the years, we've had great feedback on the grid's ability to print and render its contents (If you've used DevExpress WinForms controls in the past, you'll know that printing support is a long-standing feature). For many, this feature reduces the need to create pre-built custom reports, since end-users are able to customize the display of data within the Grid (sort, group, aggregate, add/remove columns) and then print/export the customized view. Though extremely popular, there has always been an Achilles heel to our Printing System - that being the ability to fully customize the output (be it to paper or exported to file).

Well, with our v15.2 release, we've taken ad-hoc grid-based reporting to a new level and given you a way to quickly create a report (both design and runtime), customize the report (or delegate customization to an end-user) and then send the report to a printer or export it to various formats with just a single button click.

I can definitely see myself providing this to users who want to be able to export/print grids but don't need all of the columns in the output.

My one suggestion would be to add a property to GridView that dictates the name that is shown in the "Report Wizard" dialog. Our GridView names won't necessarily mean much to an end-user and I'm not going to rename them all to something more human-friendly just for this one feature.

23 November, 2015

Del W

Nice, I could have used it the other day on a small project. I guess I will just have to update it when 15.2 comes out! ;)

23 November, 2015

Emad Alden .

Great and easy way to add custom grid report Footer

( no need to normal xtra report any more )

thanks Devexpress

23 November, 2015

Roman Kalachik (DevExpress)

Brendon, would you please describe your suggestion in greater detail? The Report Generation feature was included into the beta binaries and should be available to you for download. Please try it and share your results in a Support Center ticket.

24 November, 2015

Crono

Brendon, I tend to believe that the gridview's Name will be used only if no ViewCaption is defined.

25 November, 2015

Brendon Muck [DevExpress MVP]

I don't really have time to install the BETA, but based on what I've read above, it would seem that if I have a GridControl with a GridView named "gridView1", the Report Wizard screen is going to display "gridView1" in the drop-down list of available GridViews.

My end-users aren't going to know what "gridView1" means and if there are multiple views on a GridControl, displaying a drop-down list of "gridView1", "gridView2" and "gridView3" won't really make it any clearer.

Instead, the GridView control could have a string property called "ReportViewName" in which we can provide an end-user friendly GridView name. Using that, the drop-down in the Report Wizard screen might show "Orders", "Order Details" and "Line Items" instead of the view names, which again, mean nothing to them.

25 November, 2015

Mike Falcon (DevExpress)

Brendon, we always open to suggestions ;-). Since it's very new feature we're looking for feedback!